May 31, 2008

Callous disregard

I hope I’m not the only person who wrote in about this. Here’s what I wrote:

You miss an important point in “Kicked Out of the Play Group”: parents who shun vaccination put everyone’s children at risk. No vaccine is 100% effective, and not all children are old enough to be vaccinated. This is usually not a concern: if every child is vaccinated at the proper time, the disease cannot spread. However, every parent who decides not to vaccinate her child, for whatever reason, is removing a block from a precarious Jenga tower by making her child a vessel for preventable disease.

Whether or not this is enough to remove a child from a play group is the parents’ own call. However, it is not simply a matter of parents being cruel to their children, though that is a grave moral concern. It is a matter of parents showing callous disregard for everyone else’s children as well.